Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is the cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company bought by Google in Jan 2014. Hassabis was born in London on July 27, 1976. He is of both Greek and Chinese ancestry, with his father from Cyprus and his mother from Singapore. Hassabis was a chess prodigy from a young age, becoming a chess master at age thirteen and competing in international competitions. Finishing school two years early, Hassabis joined the video gaming company Bullfrog Productions at seventeen, becoming the lead programmer of the multi-million-selling, award-winning game Theme Park.

Hassabis attended Cambridge University between 1994 and 1997, graduating with a double first in computer science. Post-graduation, he founded the video game company Elixir Studios in 1998 and produced a number of award-winning games. After working in the video game industry and leading technology start-ups, Hassabis returned to academia, completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London in 2009. This was followed by postdocs at MIT and Harvard.

In 2010, Hassabis cofounded Deepmind, an AI company inspired by neuroscience. The company was bought by Google in January 2014. Deepmind is known for the development of AlphaGo, the first program to beat a professional player in the game of Go, and AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

Hassabis was featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people in 2017. In 2018, he was awarded a CBE for services to science and technology.